I was using a generic pair of Everlasts before, the Rev Gears are a night and day improvement. I won't be going back.

A++ would buy from again!!!11one

To ring in the upcoming new year I decided to wash all of my old gear.

For reference, the water coming out of the facet is clear.

And just because, Can Cat:

I really like this setup. It is easy to use and I have never had a problem with it besides one; my Xbox is loud. It is not any louder than a normal Xbox and in PC terms it is pretty quiet. After years of working around computers hard drive whines and fans annoy the piss out of me. Where as a normal person would never hear it, I can. Normally I can tune it out, but sometimes, like when I pause a show, I can hear it.

This is what it sounds like:

It is slowly driving me insane.

I tried out a Popcorn Hour A-110 and it did not have any where near the features or polish XBMC has. It was quiet though. I've also tried MythTV it was a pain in the ass to setup and use. Also the PC needed to run it wasn't any better noise wise than the Xbox.

Now my plan is to make the Xbox silent by purchasing a new hard drive and fan.

HD: Seagate Barracude 7200 80GB ($52 shipped)
Fan: Noctua NF-R8 Ultra Silent 80mm ($21 shipped)

Both of these come recommended as being very quiet.

Here is where this story gets sad.

The fan couldn't push enough air and my Xbox was getting too hot. Back to the old fan. Thing is, even spun up, the original fan isn't very loud. XBMC keeps it at around %20 max spin anyway. It's silent.

The new hard drive was just as loud as the old one. From experimenting a bit the hard drive is by far the loudest component in the Xbox. The only other noise makers are the DVD drive, the case fan, and the GPU fan. I never use the DVD drive. The GPU and case fans are pretty much silent.

What recourse does that leave me with? Not much really, I can purchase an SSD hard drive which will be silent as the night is dark, but they cost about $250 for 80GB. That's more than I paid for the Xbox, new hds, and fan put together. I'm not willing to do that.

My other option is to build an HTPC from scratch and use XBMC Linux. Again, relatively high cost would be factor in this too.

What I ended up doing was pushing the Xbox as far back into my entertainment center as possible. A couple inches of wood and a TV make for ok sound proofing.

Good times.

Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: can't find class file java_local/security/Provider.class in java.net.URLClassLoader

After much Googling I stumbled on a source RPM for Fedora Core 7 and I went to work. The procedure is pretty simple, grab the source RPM, run:

rpmbuild --rebuild pdftk-1.41-5.fc7.src.rpm

Then wait out all of the warnings and run:

rpm -ivh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/x86_64/pdftk-1.41-5.fc9.x86_64.rpm

The built RPMs filename will probably be different on your system.

Downloads:

• Source RPM pdftk-1.41-5.fc7.src.rpm
• Built x86 64 Fedora 9 RPM pdftk-1.41-5.fc9.x86_64.rpm

I have an Xbox with XBMC that I had been using every day. I bought the Popcorn Hour for a couple of reasons, HD, quietness, and I'm worried about my four year old Xbox having a heart attack in the middle of a movie.

It was my hope that the Popcorn hour would work at least as well as the Xbox and solve those problems. The Popcorn works exactly as advertised, no complaints there. I can plug it into my network and watch videos off of a SMB share.

I really think my problems are more, 'It is not XMBC', rather than the Popcorn Hour being flawed.

What I like:

* The case looks a lot nicer than an Xbox.
* It's silent. This is wonderful.
* Watching TV on an Xbox makes you feel like a huge nerd, not so much on the Popcorn.

My problems:

* The interface is slow. There is a second or two pause between pages when scrolling through a directory listing. XMBC can scroll through the same list in a blur. This slowness annoys the hell out of me, I don't see any reason why it should be slow either. Cache the directory listing, and then scroll the cached copy, dang.

* I have a lot of music videos that I like to queue into a random play list and play while I work around the house. Popcorn can't seem to do this.

* No FLV file support, this one is my fault for not paying attention to the supported formats list, but it still bugs me.

* Whenever a video loads, my TV displays a bright blue 'NO INPUT' screen for about four seconds before the video starts. This is annoying any time, and blinds you late at night.

As my opinion stands now I wouldn't recommend the Popcorn Hour to anyone. At first I was going to say it would be nice for someone who isn't computer savvy, but anyone capable of having a collection of ripped videos and such to warrant a Popcorn Hour is probably smart enough to figure out XBMC.

Update 11/15/08:

Some goony goon goon suggested I set the PH to use one video mode instead of auto. That fixed my TV blue screening.

I still hate the PH and I am sending it back.

My Xbox will never play HD, so for that I'm going to wait until XBMC Linux matures and then I'll build an HTPC. In the mean time, so begins Operation Silent Xbox.

Here is some example code I wrote up to play around with, it can read in XML outputted from a PHP script and display it, it can also display a digital clock.

PHP Source
Flash Source

I find the MySQL -> PHP -> XML -> Flash route to be interesting and surely there are some possibilities to be found.